1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (13 page)

Somehow we remained at least faintly familiar to him, as if our daily contact contained some coagulant that could partially plug the haemorrhage of memory, but even so, you sensed that it was like the disconcerting familiarity felt on meeting a stranger in a dream.

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Coming back from the quarry pool through the vibrant heat haze that Friday morning I felt myself as if invisible, the cells of my body insinuating themselves into the thickening air, as I came into the yard. Mother was hanging up white sheets on the washing-line. Over at the barn Daddy was passing the last bales of hay down from the loft, a task so repetitive that there weren’t sufficient intervals in which to forget the rest of the chore. Reappearing from the shadows gripping another bale by its twine and using his knee to swing it out from the loft, before letting it drop to Ian, Daddy was imbued with an illusory decisiveness and strength. Mother grasped a sheet and leaned into it, and regret stole her breath away. She stayed that way, breathing hard.

“Mother!” Ian’s voice snapped her out of herself. He came across to her. “Us is at the end of the early crop, near’s dammit. We’ve got a week’s feed left. I didn’t want to say nothin’ las’ night, but you ought to know. ‘Cos then we either buys or slaughters.”

He climbed onto his tractor and manoeuvred away. Daddy was sitting at the loft door, legs dangling, waiting for something to occur to him. Mother hurriedly pegged the rest of the washing onto the line, returned to the kitchen, and rolled herself a cigarette from the tobacco Ian kept in an old cigar box on the mantelpiece. When Ian was a boy and smoked in secret, she used to confiscate his cigarettes whenever she caught him puffing in the worksheds. After he’d gone to bed she smoked them herself. She never came to look like a smoker, though; she looked like a young girl still learning how to.

She inhaled the smoke deep into her lonely lungs. She had no friends in the village, and she never once returned to Hennock after Daddy brought her to the farm past the jealous scrutiny of the other women; their suspicion, though, only encouraged her pride and she carried herself aloof from them all: the intimacy with her one man was enough for her. In the early years of their marriage they’d meet by chance in the bedroom, drawn by a mutual whim, and mother would re-emerge into a friendly world with her body lighter. Recently, she’d noticed how her limbs had grown clumsy, and would knock into things for no good reason.

Mother rolled herself another cigarette, and as she put the lid back on the box her attention was caught by the framed set of school photographs that made us all look the same age. Mother picked it up and placed it on the table beside her as she lit her cigarette and inhaled the coarse smoke. Disappointment rose inside of her; she felt it hiss through her throat with the smoke as she studied those pictures of her children, from whom Daddy had hidden his drinking, teaching Ian chess with the set given him years before by auntie Sarah’s grandchildren from Bristol, and taking Pamela with him on his long Sunday walks around the parish, which encouraged her gregariousness, as the walks became for her simply the route from one remote farm to another, where she could renew acquaintance with friends; the flowers and birds and boundaries that Daddy pointed out held no interest for Pamela and were instantly forgotten.

It was true that he never saw much of Tom, who even as a small boy would beg to go off and help grandfather mending fences, dipping sheep, or dismantling tractor engines, invariably coming in long after his bedtime and resenting the daylight hours he had to spend at school, aching for the weekends, and beyond them the holidays, and further ahead to when he’d be able to spend all of his time tending the animals and the land.

So that when their father was swept through the house in his wind of confusion, breaking all the mirrors, my brothers and sister awoke convinced they were still dreaming.

And mother had no idea who to turn to. There was no question of her approaching grandmother: Daddy was her favourite child, and mother was sure she’d hear nothing said against him, would only blame mother for anything wrong, even more than she did herself. Finally she swallowed her pride and, even though ever since the previous Granny Sims had died the sewing circle had been steadily losing its power, she had to talk to someone. In Granny Sims’ front room half a dozen elderly women sat around dropping stitches and reliving the times when what was decided in that circle, from the buying and selling of land and livestock to prospective marriages, was invariably carried out. Mother took along some socks and darning wool, and the older women, as self-important as their predecessors even as their influence waned, leaned back in the armchairs, lace chair coverings like aureolae behind their heads, so that they resembled the fading saints on the church screen. Mother told her story and when she’d finished, after a period of silence punctuated by the clicking of knitting needles, Granny Sims leaned forward and told her: “You’re a woman. This is yours to bear.”

Mother stubbed her cigarette out in the bottom of a teacup, squashing it with her thumb as if by putting out every tiny ember she might extinguish her thoughts. But it was no use. Watching from the dim passageway, I saw her pick up the photos that made us seem like quadruplets: Ian, their chess prodigy for whom anything was possible, but who relented to the pressure from his grandfather and uncles to take over the farm that they’d been propping up until he left school. Mother sent off for prospectuses from every university and polytechnic in the country, but Ian did no more than leaf silently through them in the evenings. Still addicted to the mathematical perfection of chess, but with no opponent of sufficiently high calibre in the area, he’d entered the chimerical labyrinths of chess problems, staying up half the night in his bedroom poring over the inanimate pieces on their chequered board, though always reappearing before dawn to dispel the heavy cloud of fatigue from his shoulders with mugs of bitter tea, before setting off into the fields.

Pamela at least would escape, but then she’d been born without ties. Mother remembered the words of the old Granny Sims, who looked at her baby after the christening and told her: “She’ll cut the cord, Deborah; you can always tell.”

She possessed a freedom the rest of us lacked, as if she had just come to visit one day and had stayed a bit longer than expected. It occurred to me that maybe my own sister was in fact the guest I had been expecting. Her freedom showed in all sorts of small ways: she’d never acquired the modesty that others had, who would be embarrassed by opening the bathroom door and finding her there naked, washing her hair in the basin or painting her toenails. In fact she took over the communal rooms as if they were set aside for her personal use. Whereas the rest of us trooped in and out of the bathroom, she set up camp there, with her tray of bath oils, scented soaps, essential perfumes, facial cleansers and toners, moisturizing creams, shampoos and conditioners and massage lotions. She squirted into the bath drops of oil and scented water from various containers and ran the taps, spreading through the house aromas of lavender, coconut and roses. When the bath was full and steaming she immersed herself and stayed there, deaf to the pleas of her family, whose bladders were bursting and who’d been waiting half an hour already, because she couldn’t see why they wouldn’t come in and use the facilities anyway; she didn’t mind.

She liked me to read to her from her magazines while she lay in the bath, allowing her skin to luxuriate in the essential oils of mint and oranges, massaging herself in the water. The articles she most enjoyed were quizzes designed to ascertain whether or not she was a woman who loved too much, or a human doormat, or chased her best friends’ boyfriends, or had the problem of being a successful businesswoman but a failure in love. She answered them all, carefully selecting the answer to each question, and I ticked them off as the pages of the magazine became damp and soggy in the sauna of a bathroom, until the biro refused to work any more.

She stood up to wash her hair under the shower attachment Ian had installed, although he’d never got round to fixing a plastic curtain rail around the bath, so that the water sprayed all over the floor. Pam stood under the jet of water with her eyes closed, her body foamy with shower gel, with a smile on her face. She always peed when she took a shower: she couldn’t help herself; relaxing under the water that coursed over her body, she let go of the water inside her.

When she finally evacuated the bathroom, to the relief of her family, they found a scene of mayhem in which some natural disaster had occurred: water was dripping off the ceiling, the floor was flooded, towels had disappeared, soap was stuck to the bottom of the bath, the tops of the toothpaste tubes had vanished, and suddenly we were all out of toilet paper.

It was the same in the kitchen: there was an unwritten rule that we ate our meals together at the same time every day, breakfast at seven-fifteen and dinner at six-thirty. But Pam took less and less notice: she swept downstairs only when she heard the newcomers who gave her a lift to Exeter beeping their horn in the lane, and she grabbed whatever was on the table as she passed. In the evenings she rarely came home till late, and mother gave up putting a plate in the oven for her, because it always ended up in the pigswill. Yet mother never reproached her. She knew she’d missed the opportunity, and exactly when it had arisen: one Saturday evening five years before, when she was fifteen years old, Pamela had asked to be excused from the supper table early, because she was going out. Mother assumed she’d be off to watch television in one of the other girls’ houses, or to play in one of their rooms, as she and her friends usually did. We were finishing dessert when she reappeared in the kitchen with mascaraed eyes and vermilion lips, a pair of black net gloves that went up to her elbows and matched her tights, a black lycra dress which hugged all the curves that showed she’d become a woman, and a certain perfume whose scent caused her older brother to stop breathing. The fact was she’d grown up overnight: her father didn’t recognize her, and mother was too astonished to say anything before Pam had walked across the kitchen and through the door, said ‘See you later’ over her shoulder, and got onto the back of a stranger’s motorbike revving up in the lane. And having missed her opportunity then, instead of pouring out her cold anger, burning her daughter’s precocious wardrobe and tying her down to a regime of punishment, as everyone expected, mother simply accepted the fact that Pamela lived according to different rules from the rest of us, and from then on treated her as an equal.

I wanted to be like her, but I knew that I wasn’t. I wasn’t like any of them.

Pamela had more friends outside the village than within; she’d done a secretarial course in Exeter and now had a job there, commuting with a carload of the outsiders who’d moved into the new houses on the steep slope below the church. She was brought home by young men who, if they stayed at all, would take a glass of sherry in the front room with a look of amused condescension they made no effort to conceal.

Mother knew that one of these days Pamela would leave with one of them, carelessly, without a backward glance. No one minded.

Tom was Pamela’s opposite, bound to the land from birth. Long before puberty on his skin the scent of animals lingered and sometimes, doing up his tie or wiping a midge from his eye, mother caught the smell of new-mown hay on his breath.

He inherited his grandfather’s shyness: as a child, mother feared he was retarded because he showed no sign of speaking, until she surprised him in the barn repeating to the pigs the same stories that she’d told him, and she realized that it was just talking to other human beings that made him feel uneasy. The things that more forward children were shy about as they got older, though, Tom was unaware of. He’d belch without warning and fart without shame, filling the kitchen with a first-thing-in-the-morning pestilential smell, oblivious to mother’s eyes raised to heaven in exasperation. Even if there was company he’d break wind with the sound of a trombone, without batting an eyelid. He blew his nose by pressing a finger against one nostril and blowing, then repeating it with the other, and he’d do it anywhere so long as it was out of doors. And if he wanted to pee, even if he was with other people, he’d turn around without saying a word, step forward a pace or two, unzip his fly, and water the grass. He didn’t see anything wrong with such behaviour, because he’d learned it from the animals. But if someone asked him a question that required an answer he’d blush just like grandfather from his hairline to his collar and fumble with the words, as if they were slippery things sliding around on his tongue.

Ian was tall and stringy, with the wiry strength of his father and grandfather; Tom, on the other hand, had been given his body and his sluggish metabolism by the maternal line of our family. He was like an overgrown cherub, heavy-lidded and heavy-limbed, neither soft nor hard, neither fat nor muscular, but rather built of undefined muscle, or substantial fat, as solid and strong as a bull. Ian and Tom had never fought as youngsters: Tom wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. He never contradicted his older brother, who did the accounts, decided crop rotation, ordered foodstuffs and conferred with the vet. But Tom knew things that could never be learned. During the lambing season he stayed out day and night, and when a tardy cow was brought into the barn it was he who extended his arm into its slippery womb and eased the birth of a calf.

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One Saturday back in May Ian had asked me to check the cows in the far pasture. Half the herd were heavy with calf, ponderous in their movement, passing through time itself at a different pace, appropriate to their weight and condition. I stood on the lower rung of the gate. The sun was slanting across the field and the cows had scattered themselves across it, grazing. I was about to leave when I realized that, without fuss or warning, no more than thirty feet from me a cow was giving birth: she stopped grazing and started to drop her calf, just like that, still chewing the cud. But it didn’t come out all at once: the top of its head appeared, and then a little more, and then all of its head up to the shoulders. There it stayed, its eyes closed, half in the world and half still in its mother’s womb, as if reluctant to wake up from the long sleep of gestation into the bright light of life. Its mother, too, looked unsure, not quite able to make up her mind whether or not to let go of the companion who’d shared her body.